"I am proud to shut down the government for border security, Chuck, because the people of this country don’t want criminals and people that have lots of problems and drugs pouring into our country. So I will take the mantle. I will be the one to shut it down. I’m not going to blame you for it." -- Trump, 12/11/18

Words of Advice:

"Never Feel Sorry For Anyone Who Owns an Airplane."-- Tina Marie

"If Something Seems To Be Too Good To Be True, It's Best To Shoot It, Just In Case." -- Fiona Glenanne

"Flying the Airplane is More Important than Radioing Your Plight to a Person on the GroundWho is Incapable of Understanding or Doing Anything About It." -- Unknown

"There seems to be almost no problem that Congress cannot, by diligent efforts and careful legislative drafting, make ten times worse." -- Me

If you're in a group of black folks protesting police brutality, you can expect to have weapons pointed at you, hit with tear gas and pepper spray, have dogs sicced on you and hauled off to jail on flimsy, bullshit charges.

If you're in a group of Indians protesting desecration of sacred sites, you can expect to have weapons pointed at you, hit with tear gas and pepper spray, have dogs sicced on you and hauled off to jail on flimsy, bullshit charges.

If you're in a group of modern hippies, protesting the American Oligarchy, you can expect to have weapons pointed at you, hit with tear gas and pepper spray, have dogs sicced on you and hauled off to jail on flimsy, bullshit charges.

If you're a reporter covering any of that, you can expect to be hauled off to jail on bullshit charges that violate the First Amendment.

But if you're a pack of heavily-armed white guys, protesting the Federal government's administration of its own fucking lands, you're going to get treated with kid fucking gloves and if you get charged with anything, a jury's likely to wink at you and let you go. Because you're going to get a true jury of your peers, something that everyone else will be denied. The prosecutors in any jury trials of the other groups will do their damnedest to ensure that.

This has nothing to do with guns, by the way. If black protestors were openly armed, the cops would hose them down with machine guns. For the Indians, protesting on rural land, they'd have gotten a couple of Cobras or A-10s for that (with WP rockets).

Over in the UK, wouldn't that qualify as a "workplace fatality"? Or maybe discrimination, for when it comes to citizens killing criminals, criminals are apparently a protected class.

But I digress.

The big boys in Corporate HQs for retail chains and franchise operations hate it when one of their lowest-level minions kills an armed robber. First off, that robber and his peeps might also be customers or even future hires. Second, it is far less costly for Corporate to hire replacements for slain employees than to pay civil litigation defense lawyers.

Friday, October 28, 2016

First off, the moron is going out to ride his bike in a thunderstorm. That is such a patently bad idea that I see no need to expound further on that.

Second, in dim light with low visibility, the moron is wearing a black riding getup with no reflectivity. He is just asking to be center-punched into the Next World by anything the size of a SmartCar or larger. Hell, if he gets clipped by a large truck, the driver might not even know that a bike-riding moron just died.

What I can see is Apple ending up in court, defending against a wrongful-death suit. One would hope that they lose and lose badly.

Seems as though a lot of marketing people need to be beaten with a clue-bat each morning.

Can you imagine the sheer volume of uproar on the Right if Clinton even hinted at such a thing? But Trump declares that he wants to be named dictator and not a peep.

There are some serious sufferers of Clinton Derangement Syndrome if they would vote for a man who openly aspires to be a dictator. At this point, he really wouldn't lose any votes if there was video showing him setting fire to homeless people.

Chaffetz is the Italian equivalent of a congressman, always willing to switch to whatever side appears to be winning at the time.

He's a fucking Issa-grade weasel. I'd say that he has the spine of a garden slug or an earthworm, but those species both have ecological niches to fill. Unlike Chaffetz, who is only a witch-hunting, worthless bloodsucker on on the body politic.

The Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, a group made up largely of white men with disposable income, submitted a list of questions to both presidential campaigns concerning the importance of general aviation.

You're running for office. You get a free shot to speak to about 400,000 people who probably will largely turn out to vote. A hell of a lot of them are able to write decent checks to support a candidate. And it may be a reasonable bet that the majority of them are sympathetic to your party.

So why the fuck would you blow off a chance to get your message across to them?

ACHTUNG IDIOTS: Threatening people with dangerous implements (or weapons) is never a good idea. When you dress up in a costume and then do it, you are asking for your name to be splashed across the Intertubes, for anyone to find.

So don't do stupid shit. And if you can't resist doing stupid shit that will get your dumb ass spread around the world, at least have the good sense to drag your ass down to your local courthouse and get your name changed to "John Smith" or "Jane Brown" as a way to at least minimally Google-proof your stupid ass.

When the GOP took control of Congress, Issa was drooling at the mouth in anticipation of having the power to begin investigations and issue subpoenas. And so he, did, one after another. It was nothing more than pure political harassment and witch-hunting, for, in the six years that Mr. Issa, a cold mockery of a human being, has been conducting his so-called "investigations", he has not laid a single glove on the President or his administration.

Issa is a walking, talking example of a partisan hack. And for him to now try to tie himself, even in a small way, to President Obama, shows that he has not a shred of honor.

When he passes by, people should spit on his path. He should be shunned as though he has a loathsome disease. "You are as honorable as Darrell Issa" should be legally recognized as fighting words. Hardware stores in California should name their tool bins after Issa.

Sunday, October 23, 2016

He was in oodles of them, something like twelve debates and nine forums. And yet, in damn few, if any of them, was anyone able to land a decent victory, let alone a damaging blow, against Trump.

But Hillary Clinton cleaned his clock every time. Why was that?

I have two ideas about that.

First off, the other GOP candidates were afraid to go hard after Trump. In the back of their minds had to have been the thought that if they were too rough on His Orangeness, that the voters who backed Trump might not back them post-convention. That's always a concern; they want to win, but they also need the other candidates supporters to turn out for them in November.

(Remember how much it was a concern that Sanders voters might not turn out for Clinton? People were talking about that a few months ago, but Trump's inherent awfulness seems to have largely quieted that down.)

The second reason that Clinton was able to carve up Trump like a pot roast may have to do with Trump's bone-deep misogyny. He clearly has no respect for women and it bothers him to his puerile core that he has to fight against one.

Whether it was misogyny or arrogance that prevented Trump from learning from his loss in the first debate is a good question. I suspect it was more the former, he couldn't believe that He, The Donald was beaten like a gong by a woman. Trump couldn't comprehend that he just couldn't go into the debates and wing it with a bunch of snappy one-liners. In retrospect, Clinton studied Trump and had a plan on what buttons to push and when to push them. The invocation of the Miss Universe that Trump thought was fat was genius-- Trump stepped on his crank, then put on his golfing shoes and kept stepping on it for days.

So now, the GOP is going around, trying to persuade people to split their tickets and vote for the down-ballot Republicans. Which is an indication that they think Trump is going to be shellacked.

Is it just me, or does it seem as though at least have of the people blathering about "the revolution that will happen if Clinton wins" are obese, grey-haired white dudes, half of whom have beards?

As BadTux has pointed out, based on what happened at Malheur, there isn't going to be any such revolution. Every leftist group, including the Quakers, already knows that any time they plan a protest, at least some of the planners are spying on them for the local cops, the Army or the FBI.

It's no different with the right-wing groups. They're all riddled with informers. By the time five or six people are involved, figure at least one of them is a rat.

And that doesn't even get to the part that a revolutionary group of old, fat white guys isn't going to raise much of a sweat for the government when it comes time to crush them.

And here is hoping that, when he does that, he gets his ass sanctioned by the courts. Trump has said, in various interviews in the past, that he did much of what he is accused of doing.

Litigating this shit also keeps the accusations alive for years. But he doesn't think like that. Trump is a short-fingered bully, this threat is just more evidence of that. He has a very big mouth and a very thin skin.

Next month, when he stands a very good chance of losing to the most electorally vulnerable Democratic candidate since Alton Parker, he likely may win the title of the Biggest Loser of the 21st Century. Which may drive him mad.

What none of the family, nor the judge, seemed to give two shits about was the twelve-year old girl that Pervo-Dad repeatedly raped.

If some clown had raped one of my nieces or cousins, the only way I'd be fine with him spending sixty days in jail would be if he went to the gallows on Day 60. And, Gentle Readers, I expect that the same is largely true with you.

The criminal justice system would seem to have a problem when it comes to females as victims of sex crimes. I will hazard a guess that if Pervo-Dad had raped one of his sons, he wouldn't have been let out of prison until the last quarter of this century.

Rubio, of course, isn't trying to desperately find anything that will give his campaign traction.

But Rubio also knows that being seen as a tool, however unwittingly, of Vladimir Putin and the FSB is a stench that will hang on the GOP for a very long time. Trump doesn't care about any of that, for he is an opportunist member of the GOP. He has no loyalty whatsoever to the party or any whit of concern about its long-term prospects. If the GOP gets pulled down in ruins around his campaign, he's just fine with that.

I'd call Trump an "opportunistic jackal", except that if jackals were able to contact a lawyer, I could be sued for defaming their character.

So this genius of a hacker, who might have reasonably assumed that American intelligence and law enforcement knew who he was, wanders into a NATO nation and gets arrested.

Note that the perp was the subject of an Interpol "red notice". Russia is a member of Interpol. If the Russian spooks are heavily into hacking, one might assume that they'd monitor the red notice list and warn their guys know not to leave the country. Which means that this guy may not be one of their pet hackers. Or he just may be as arrogant as Pharma Bro/Sis.

If it wasn't for the third game of the 1989 World Series, between Oakland and San Francisco, the death toll might have been higher, as a lot of people who would have been commuting when the quake struck were in front of TV sets.

Sunday, October 16, 2016

I picked up a copy of Stephen Hunter's 2008 novel Night of Thunder a few weeks ago at a thrift store.* In the story, the hero says these words, in Vietnamese, to a young girl whose warning saved him and a friend from being ambushed:

Martin Shkreli, one of the most-despised and despicable sacks of sentient protoplasm on the planet, wanted to meet his fans after his last court date. So he tweeted out the name of a bar and announced that he'd pick up the tab. Only he didn't clear it with the bar, which said "nope." So this is what he then tweeted:

Friday, October 14, 2016

When a judge explains to you, at the start of a hearing, that (a) you have a right to have an attorney; (b) if you cannot afford one, that one will be appointed to represent you at no cost to you; and (c) the hearing will be postponed until that attorney is brought into the case, well, that is what we call a big-ass, fireworks-shooting, horn-blaring, motherfucking, Captain-Obvious level clue.

Most of the "for" list are islamic nations, and to be frank, I'd expect that sort of historical nonsense from them. To the Dominican Republic and Nicaragua: Next time either of your nations gets hit by a hurricane or an earthquake, go ask your friend the Palestinians for help. To Brazil: Fuck you and may the Zika virus reach a 100% infection rate.

And to Mexico: If Trump wins, I'll cough up to help build his wall, especially if he promises to install a bunch of SM-70s.

As for the abstaining nations: Thanks for nothing, you gutless cocksuckers.

Trump is saying "why didn't they say so at the time"? Anyone who thinks that doesn't understand what happens when one woman accuses a powerful man of sexual misconduct: She gets fucking buried.[2] Whether powerful men[3] or powerful institutions,[4] nobody believes a single accuser, not until there are multiple accusers and evidence of the accusations.

So what we have, now, is an American political candidate who is trying to prop up his campaign with documents that have been furnished by the spooks of a hostile power. His lackeys on the Right see nothing wrong with any of that. But you can bet your paycheck that they'd be calling for Clinton's immediate execution if the situation was reversed.

Still, it is very enjoyable to see the same people, who have spent two decades blasting Bill Clinton for being a sexual predator, now twisting themselves into knots to defend Trump for actions that were worse. (Leering at a 10-year old? Really?)[6]

Christie, along with most of his party, despise mass-transit to begin with. That much is a given. In their view, the proles should be walking along dirt paths as the elite glide in on expensive toll roads.

There is also the Wall-Street Disease: A total focus on the short term, with zero planning for any period of time past the present quarter or the current budget cycle. That's why pensions are underfunded, roads are falling apart, and mass-transit systems are breaking down. Tools like Secaucus Fats care not that cutting a million here and there from maintenance budgets means that there will be more breakdowns, more emergent repairs and sooner replacements that will end up costing a few orders of magnitude more money than they have boasted that they saved.

Christie is leaving his state in far worse condition than it was when he took over. He has utterly failed the Boy Scout Test. No wonder he wants to bail to be a lackey in a Trump administration.

Wednesday, October 12, 2016

At the moment, that applies to Republican political candidates. Every day or two brings to light more and more unsavory shit about Donald Trump. I suspect that the current polls understate his problem, as there may be a number of Republican women who are keeping quiet to pollsters and to their families, but will not vote for Trump.

So what do Republican candidates do? The day when one could declare to be #NeverTrump and appear to be principled are long past. Those denouncing Trump now, especially those who have denounced and then backtracked look like practitioners of the low art of expediency.

Those who now drop Trump will lose a portion of the GOP base. Those who don't drop Trump will lose votes from independents. Those who drop Trump and survive will be primaried by the same batshit-crazy people who brought you Trump. If they survive that, their next general election campaign will chain them to the rotting corpse of the Trump candidacy.

And Paul Ryan's speakership will end in January. If the Republicans hold the House, he won't have enough votes to survive.

What you'll now hear from is the Loyal Defenders of The Donald, who will explain that it was No Big Deal™. But if Bill Clinton had done it, those very same people would be calling for his head on a pike.

The Waffling Wisconsin Weasel won't be bothered to take a stand. He'll try to cleave to the middle of the GOP road.

But there is no middle in this election. The GOP base will view this as yet another backstabbing from a Washington insider. Those opposed to Trump will see it as an act of political triangulation, which, in this instance, translates to "political cowardice".

Sunday, October 9, 2016

Thirteen million people voted for Donald Trump and he won the nomination.

Twelve million people voted for Bernie Sanders. While more voted for Clinton, many of those votes were cast after it was all over for Sanders, and many more were cast in states that haven't voted Democratic since the two parties traded stances on civil rights.

The party elites in the Democratic party pushed Clinton and, between machinations and super delegates, had a large part in crushing the Sanders's campaign. The party elites in the Republican party may yet succeed in pushing Trump out of the race.

But the anger of tens of million of voters, the conviction shared by all of them that the system is rigged and that the parties care nothing about them, will not go away.

There are five good reasons why Donald Trump should not quit the race.

The first is technical. Most states use paper ballots, either they are counted by hand or fed into scanners. Those ballots have been printed. All states uses paper ballots for absentee voting. Absentee ballots are already being distributed (and have been for weeks).

The second is a matter of electoral fairness. For both absentee voters and voters in states that allow early voting, the election is, in fact, under way. They've made their choices based on who is on the ballot. It would be an unprecedented bait-and-switch for Trump to drop out.

The third is notice to the voters of who are the candidates. If Trump drops out, then another vice-presidential candidate would have to be chosen. There is no mechanism for that, and likely, the choice wouldn't be made until after the election. The voters have the right to evaluate the candidates and make their choices; Trump dropping out would say to the voters "trust us, we're going to pick a decent man."

And trust whom, exactly? The Republican party elites? Their views were soundly rejected by the party's voters in the primary contest. If the opinions of the party elites mattered to the GOP base, the number of Trump voters would've not filled up a short bus.

Which brings me to reason #4: Trump received over 13 million votes in the primaries, which were the most ever for a GOP candidate.

The "will of the people" is one of those concepts that politicians speak of in glowing terms and then disregard at the drop of a hat. Trump's flaws were well-known to anyone who had bothered to look and yet, the GOP voters chose him. They turned their collective backs on the party elites and the professional pols and chose Trump, a completely untested amateur, as their guy. You can bet that most of those voters will look on a Trump resignation as his having been pushed out by the party, a penultimate backstabbing by the pros.

And then to tell those thirteen million Trump voters that they're supposed to turn out for a clown that wasn't even running in the primaries? Good luck with that.

The last is Donald Trump. While he might be able to accept being defeated as either evidence that he couldn't close the deal or console himself with conspiracy theories about how Hillary Clinton conned the voters or whatnot, there's no such consolation to be had should he drop out. Dropping out is Donald Trump having to acknowledge that he's a loser. He would have to essentially fire himself. He would be a self-admitted failure. That would be a reversal of his entire personality.

Besides, all you have to do is look at the Right's reaction, which is "Bill Clinton was worse". Expect to hear a lot of that from The Donald.

Saturday, October 8, 2016

Their defense consists of "Bill Clinton was worse". And The Donald says that he'll make an issue of Bill Clinton's infidelities.

Point one: Bill Clinton isn't running for anything. That this has to even be pointed out shows the depth of the Right's infection by Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

Point two: Trump has no ground to stand on. He has cheated on all of his wives. He cheated on wife #1, Ivana, with Marla Maples. He then divorced Ivana, married Marla, and then cheated on her with Melania Knauss. He then married Melania and has since cheated on her.

And who are Trump's advisors: Newt Gingrich, who has been married three times and cheated on his second wife with the woman who he later married. Rudy Giuliani has, like Trump and Gingrich, been married three times and cheated on his second with with the woman who became Mrs. Giuliani the Third.

Maybe you can detect a pattern.

When it comes to the moral highground of marriage and fidelity, Trump, Giuliani and Gingrich are yelling from the lowest sub-basement that there is.

But none of this matters to the poor sufferers of Clinton Derangement Syndrome.

As far as the "cui bono" question, I'll set that aside, because the answer is rather plain.

No doubt that Wikileaks will soon start releasing stuff that they got from the Russians. A wise person will put no stock in any of it.
The Russians have a decades-long record of document forgery. They've forged emails. There was a story, a long time ago, that an American reporter in Europe found an envelope in his car; the envelope contained documents that were damning to Zbigniew Brzezinski, then the National Security Advisor. The newspaper vetted the documents carefully and concluded that they were forged.

Whatever Wikileaks releases to try and sway the election should be regarded as Russian forgeries until proven otherwise.

Sunday morning, I played the feather game with Chip. After a bit, I put it back up on top of the refrigerator.

A little later, while I was having coffee and reading the paper, I heard a suspicious noise from the kitchen. I put down both the coffee mug and the paper and, as I stood up, Chip came proudly out of the kitchen, carrying the feather toy in his mouth, with the pole trailing behind him.

He then flopped down on the carpet and proceeded to beat the hell out of the toy.

Trump is a pig and he cheated on every one of his wives. The man would fuck a gator if he could get his aides to hold down the tail (and keep their mouths shut). He's the closest thing to an unarrested sexual predator that anyone is likely to find.

But is this really a surprise to anyone?

Well, so much for "the party of moral values" and "restoring decency".

Thursday, October 6, 2016

What they all should do is go buy an anemometer at a big-box sporting goods store and then take their fair asses to the east coast of Florida and George. They should stand on the shore, measure the winds, and let us know if it was really all that bad. Maybe Oxy-Boy will ferry them in with his Gulfstream-V.

If you look at the next photo, there are holes in the central hull that appear to have been made from the outside. I don't know if they are impact holes from weapons fire, or holes for waste discharge systems. I tend to suspect the latter, as if the ship had taken small-arms fire, I would have expected to see similar hulls in the side hulls.

The video of the attack may have been doctored. It appears to show the launching of a pretty large weapon, as you can see what appears to be the booster separate. But the damage to the ship may be suggestive of the ship being hit with antitank rockets that triggered secondaries from the cargo. The Iranian Noor/Qader ASCM has a warhead of about 500lbs-- a 500lb warhead detonating inside an aluminum-hulled ship of that size likely would have blown the living shit out of it.

Or, possibly, the warhead didn't detonate and only the fuel did. That's not unknown with such weapons, i.e., the HMS Sheffield and the USS Stark.

Full disclosure: I have a Yahoo mail account. I only use it for signing up for online contests and other such bullshit that's guaranteed to generate tons of spam.

Yahoo sucks. In the late `90s, when they were the search engine, they annoyed the shit out of everyone by loading up search results with sponsored links. Their pages were clunky and slow to load, which was a big deal in a time when most people were using dial-up modems at 56K or slower. Google came along and very quickly ate Yahoo's lunch.

If you have a Yahoo account that you use for any reason other than spam-catching, you should change to another provider-- at least one that is not so eager to help the spooks spy on you.

But the sad reality is that nobody really gives a fuck. Of all the years that I've had PGP installed, only one email correspondent engages in encrypted communications with me. I have the Signal app on my phone-- nobody else I know uses it.

So as much as people cavail about DasGov reading their personal shit, they won't take a few simple steps to prevent them from doing it. Yes, it's illegal for a burglar to walk through your front door and take your shit. But you shouldn't be leaving your front door open, let alone unlocked.

Don't make it easy for the criminals to take your shit (and yes, I regard the spooks as being no better than criminals).

None of this should be a surprise to anyone. If you think that the cops are acting as an occupying army in your neighborhood, you're not going to call them.

The referenced beating was yet another case where the local prosecutors dragged their feet and, when they eventually brought the eight cops involved to trial, all were acquitted by (wait for it) all-white juries.

I predict that this change will last about as long as the abolition of the crackerjack uniform or the adoption of aquaflage.

Traditions matter. Those who got upset that the term "man" was in the names of ratings titles should probably have opted to gotten a job at some place a little better suited for their sensibilities.

Secretary of the Navy Mabus ought to be run out of D.C. on a fucking rail, but only after the traditionally-required tarring and feathering. That decision is basically a reprehensible mixture of extreme political correctness and stupidity and should be reversed.

Would Trump be happier if we followed the example of the Brits 100 years ago and just had them shot for "lack of moral fibre"?

A man who has never had a physically strenuous job in his life, let alone having never served in the armed forces and never having to suffer being shot at has some gall questioning the strength of anyone who answered our nation's call in time of war.

But hey, you Republicans, keep on backing this guy as he betrays everything that you once held dear.

Those older ASCMs truck along at about 700 MPH. Some of the somewhat newer ones are a tad bit slower. And some of the newer ones can be fired from shipping containers.

If you want more than a minute or two's worth of detection and tracking of an incoming missile, then you have to operate thirty or forty miles offshore. Which pretty much guts the original rationale for the LCS class, as they will be no more survivable in such an environment than was the late HSV-2.

A rich fucker who doesn't pay taxes is a leech, a moocher, a parasite. He's not a fucking genius, he's a grifter.

And you can bet your sweet ass that if Hillary Clinton hadn't paid any taxes in two decades, the same scum-sucking weasels who are stumbling over their own feet to praise Donald the Grifter would bet taking to the airwaves and TWitter to condemn her.

Understated is the fact that thousands and thousands of people lost their jobs and thousands of investors lost their money due to Trump's "genius".

Saturday, October 1, 2016

I like this toy better than of a laser pointer. The target moves in three dimensions and I can let him win from time to time.

He doesn't shed very much. This is the result of a full-body brushing:

His only quirk is a desire to explore the garage when I'm getting ready to leave. Some days, I can block him. Other days, he squirts by me. Chip can move very quickly. So I put stuff in my car at least five to ten minutes before I need to go. If he gets into the garage, I shut the door and turn out the lights (there are no windows). Wait five minutes, open the door and he'll come back into the house.

Rule No. 5: Terms of Service: Political appointees of the Obama and Bush Administrations may not read this blog unless they (i) post a comment confessing same and (ii) acknowledge that both men are war criminals. This blog may not be read by members of the Arizona Legislature.

Violation of this term is a violation of 18 U.S.C. 1030(a)(2)(C) and you're off to share a cell with Chris Christie, asswipe.

Rule No. 6: If I wanted you to write a "guest post", I'd ask you. Don't bother asking me to put one up from you. I won't. Start yer own goddamn blog.You Have Been Warned.